Service-oriented architectures are architectures that make computing services available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementations. Prior-art service-oriented architectures provide the resources to the applications through network-based protocols, which are text-/web-based protocols such as are commonly used for Internet-based communications. Common network protocols of this type include HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. These various protocols may perform one or more functions for the network communications protocols, but the common root of these protocols is that they are a part of, rely on, or otherwise use web-/text-based communications. Further, the prior-art network communications protocols used are typically implemented through synchronous SOAP/HTTP communications signaling pathways.
Another prior-art approach includes a service broker, which is provided within a network to distribute application workloads from network clients to be run as service instances on the network resources. As with the other prior-art approach, this approach has suffered from the limitations of using text-based/web-based communications protocols for communicating between the client, the broker, and the service instances.
This prior-art approach also is limited in that it uses a pull-based access protocol to determine the statuses of the available service instances, whereby the service instances will notify the broker that they have additional capacity for processing jobs from the client. The difficulty with the pull-based approach is that it can introduce latency in the roundtrip job processing time. Specifically, if there are multiple service instances running, the service instances are set to poll the broker for incoming jobs so that the service instances know when there is work to be done.